day 3 – driving inland

November 3, 2008

I wrote this poem in 2002, while living in Nelson, BC. I was taking Creative Writing 101 at the Kootenay School of the Arts and I nearly shit myself every Tuesday evening when I had to read my assignment out loud, in front of the entire class. I survived and came out of it with a badge of courage, more than anything.

I lived this poem in the spring of 1998, while interning as an Avian Field Biologist for the Wildlife Preservation Trust. It was 3 months of roughing it in Cockpit Country, a rugged jungle in the interior of Jamaica, in search of Yellow-Billed and Black-Billed Parrots. It was the first time I experienced being a minority and it is also where I became an expert at spotting, identifying and removing ticks in places one should never have to find ticks, ever. I came out of it humbled and grateful for things we all take for granted, such as running water and electricity and not finding ticks in warm places.

I posted this poem when I first started blogging in January of 2007. A time when only my mother and sisters were reading my ramblings and I wondered if anyone else would ever come visit my little space on the Internet. Alas, any entry prior to June 11 of this year has vanished, so technically, it’s as if the poem had never been posted in the first place (except for the fact that I just admitted to its existence). Still, I feel justified in sharing it again, on this new space, where it has never been read before. Although it is not a staggering work of genius, I’ll be happy knowing that it has found a cozy creative nest to rest in rather than fading away on a musty smelling piece of paper.

Driving Home

I drive inland behind a small taxi
cramped with passengers
hanging out the windows,
past lobster huts and ice markets
where men lift frozen blocks
with picks like beaks of hawks.

I turn left at the last electrical pole
where shoeless children,
feet powdered with road silt,
walk miles from classrooms;
they wave and chase me down
narrow serpentine roads.